Young Music'16: comments, impressions, references 3

Tautvydas Bajarkevičius
www.kamane.lt, 2016-05-11
The premieres of Lithuanian composers' electroacoustic musics pieces. Tomas Terekas' photo.

In brief: Festival Young Music dedicated to contemporary music took place in Vilnius on April 18-23. As it has recently become customary, this year's festival has also featured genre variations combining various manifestations of live electronics, electroacoustic, digital and chamber music. Also there were plenty of conceptualized listening situations, performativity and improvisation combining the variety of media.

This year's festival's novelty - the three parts of the program. The first one consisted of the main concerts; the second one of the late night shows that can be easily called non-binding and the third, which featured lectures and discussions.

Having the opportunity to evaluate the festival as a whole, I will allow myself to say that this year's Young Music seemed quite chamber, compact and focusing around the clear nucleus of creative ideas; extending the preference to more striking flashes instead of large ambitions; striving to maintain a certain qualitative uniformity; seeking to renew.

The main program of the festival this year, was clearly inspired by the desire to try and reveal a certain continuity of contemporary electronic music's artistic language in respect to more or less conventional genres and forms of musical language.

From this part of the program I would single out two concerts: Lithuanian younger generation composers Marius Baranauskas, Monika Sokaitė, Julius Aglinskas, Albertas Navickas and Diana Čemerytė's electroacoustic music premieres and a German guest Johannes Kreidler's performance. Both concerts took place at the Arts Printing House. Both had plenty of theatricality of some kind.

Lecture and discussion program seemed intriguing, because it consisted of the above-mentioned composers Johannes Kreidler and David Behrman, as well as guest from Berlin, curator Carsten Seiffarth's presentations. This part of the program was complemented with a discussion moderated by the festival host Edvardas Šumilas on the ratio of musicology and composition. Although this part of the program seemed intriguing and promised to create an intellectually playful arena for some interesting polemics, in reality it lacked something...

It seems that the younger generation of composers is interested in electronic and electroacoustic integration into chamber music genre. It also affects its aesthetics, which reflects the influences of minimalism, attention to timbre with remaining respect for the conventional duration of the piece and its structural components. Each work, at the same time, is a king of theatrical mise-en-sc`ene: the lighting becomes active and performers turn into distinct stage characters. In this way, not only through the musical language but also with the help of visual language instrument's features are revealed; its role in a given composition.


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